A typical contact center algorithmically assigns contacts arriving at the contact center to agents available to handle those contacts. At times, the contact center may have agents available and waiting for assignment to inbound or outbound contacts (e.g., telephone calls, Internet chat sessions, email). At other times, the contact center may have contacts waiting in one or more queues for an agent to become available for assignment.
In some typical contact centers, contacts are assigned to agents ordered based on time of arrival, and agents receive contacts ordered based on the time when those agents became available. This strategy may be referred to as a “first-in, first-out,” “FIFO,” or “round-robin” strategy. In other typical contact centers, other strategies may be used, such as “performance-based routing,” or a “PBR” strategy.
In other, more advanced contact centers, contacts are paired with agents using a “behavioral pairing,” or a “BP” strategy, under which contacts and agents may be deliberately (preferentially) paired in a fashion that enables the assignment of subsequent contact-agent pairs such that when the benefits of all the assignments under a BP strategy are totaled they may exceed those of FIFO and other strategies such as performance-based routing (“PBR”) strategies. BP is designed to encourage balanced utilization of agents within a skill queue while nevertheless simultaneously improving overall contact center performance beyond what FIFO or PBR methods will allow. This is a remarkable achievement inasmuch as BP acts on the same calls and same agents as FIFO or PBR methods, utilizes agents approximately evenly as FIFO provides, and yet improves overall contact center performance. BP is described in, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 9,300,802, which is incorporated by reference herein. Additional information about these and other features regarding the pairing or matching modules (sometimes also referred to as “SATMAP,” “routing system,” “routing engine,” etc.) is described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 8,879,715, which is incorporated by reference herein.
In some typical contact centers, contacts may be presented with hold music or informational messages while the contacts are waiting to be connected to an agent. Some of the contacts may not enjoy the default hold activity, and the hold activity provides no usable information to a BP strategy.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there may be a need for a system that enables contact centers to present preferred hold activities to contacts, as well as to use information about preferred hold activities in a pairing strategy, so as to improve the efficiency and performance of pairing strategies that are designed to choose among multiple possible pairings, such as a BP strategy.